The other day, Thomas Wilde — former writer on this site and all around good guy — emailed me with a couple pages from last week’s Amazing Spider-Man. Notably, the part with the Spider-Man/Wolverine fist-bump. He wanted me to do something with it in terms of a battle rap.
This is what became of the challenge.
With apologies to hermanos. I promise no battle raps in the next Ultimatum Edit.
No idea, but Gav told me to do this.
From the ever-classic rap battle.
True story: I hated Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram. I read the first issue and found it impenetrable and kind of a hipster music snob’s version of DC’s incestuous continuity porn. I dug McKelvie’s art, and his name is now usually enough to get me to at least skim a new comic, but it wasn’t enough to keep me reading a book that I had absolutely no interest in. All of the references went whizzing right over my head, but they didn’t confuse me exactly. It was more like I recognized that the book wasn’t being written for me. I don’t think I’d even heard actual Britpop before, I dunno, Guitar Hero.
An off-hand comment by a friend about comic stories that she wants to be told led to me thinking about Phonogram. Phonogram is proof that comics can do basically anything. Phonogram is about, according to wikipedia, “a mage who uses the medium of Britpop music to interpret his magic.” Think Zatanna, but with Oasis instead of talking backwards. Alongside Phonogram stands superheroes, comics about depressed midwesterners, video game-inspired pop culture reference fests, and easily dozens of other stories.
So, where are the stories I want to see? I’ve got a wish list of things I’d like to read in comic form, and I think a few of these are interesting enough that people who aren’t me would be interested, too.
The Great Migration
Ever heard of this? The Great Migration altered the racial make-up of the populated of the United States forever. It’s my understanding that prior to the Great Migration, something like 90% of American blacks lived in the South. Racism, economic reasons, and a number of other issues led to the large-scale exodus. After it, blacks were spread all over the country, mainly in urban areas.
The jobs they found up north and to the west were largely industrial in nature, and in and around cities. This was a marked change from the rural life and farming to be found in the south. You couldn’t really leave to get a job and ship money back to your family at this point, either, so your whole brood had to come with you.
You have the makings of an interesting story there. An entire family, torn from everything they know, shipping off to somewhere new, where there are new dangers, but also new opportunities. Adults who’d only known one thing being forced to learn something new to provide for their children. In a way, it’s a classic american tale. The Great Migration was about pulling yourself up from less than nothing so that your kids could have a better future than you did.
Interestingly, I’m pretty sure the Great Migration is why so many city-based blacks have family down south nowadays. Not everyone could leave, and family ties are hard to break.
Music
Specifically, rap.
Read the rest of this entry �
Nas’s Illmatic is basically my favorite album. It’s ten tracks are essentially perfect, and it’s one of the few albums that I can listen to in order over and over again over the course of a day. I woke up to find scans of XXL’s feature about the making of the best record of all time. It’s must-reading.
The thing about black culture, and this is something that’s often understated or ignored when discussing race in America, is that it is American culture, through and through. Black culture has permeated American culture across a variety of formats and in varying degrees. In music, the progression from gospel, blues, jazz, rock, and rap has run the industry for decades. Kids all over the country are wearing white tees and baggy jeans, no matter their racial background or upbringing.
Is it racial appropriation? Is Eminem a wigger because he’s a kid who grew up to be a rapper? Is Ill Bill out of line for making White Nigger, about his childhood growing up as a white Jew? Was it cool for Big Pun, a puerto rican from the Bronx, to be one of the best emcees that ever did it? Or did they grow up able to relate?
One of my favorite music videos is Three 6 Mafia’s “Dope Boy Fresh.” The important part is the video part of the music video. The song is straight, but beside the point. It’s a flip on the movie Being John Malkovich, and allows viewers a trip into the mind of Three 6. My favorite bits in the video are the young kid at the beginning (“Murcielago with the wings out!”) and the asian girl at the end (around 3:33, though 3:36-3:38 is on some next level amazing type thing).
The first thing I thought when I saw this video was “Man, that’s pretty dang cool.” It’s a video that stuck with me, though, which doesn’t happen with most. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like it was illustrating some seriously basic point, a point so basic that it was tough to put it into words. Realizing that these people were stepping into someone else’s shoes and clothes, but still looking normal was the key. Sure, the old white dude is kinda corny, like the old guy at the club who nobody knows but keeps dancing with the young girls, but the rest of them just look like people. They look natural.
It put something into perspective for me. I’ve never really bought into the idea of wiggers or whatever. C-Rayz Walz and 4th Pyramid’s “Blackout” basically killed that entire idea for me.
If you black, with a degree, and you work
and got a happy family, they say you wanna be white!
If you white, with bells, smoke weed, listen to rap
and live free, they say you wanna be black!
It’s all the same. The white kid on the bus with his short hair covered by a New Era isn’t jacking culture or appropriating ideas. At this point, he probably grew up with it. It’s what he knows. It’s what we both know.
Coming to this realization was the final nail in the coffin for both wiggers and blacks in comics being something special. Everybody’s got black friends. My mom listens to some rap, but she also put me on to No Doubt back when Tragic Kingdom came out. I’ve got white friends who consistently surprise me with their rap knowledge.
Comics, in general, treat white males as normal. Women and people of other races are notable, and are judged on a frankly pathetic scale. If you write a mediocre comic featuring a gay couple or a black guy or a woman, well, hey! Have these awards! Way to go! The barrier for quality is lower, since if you’re already doing something adventurous by even writing black people, you must be doing something right!
If you compare comics and real life, though, you’ll find a different story. It’s 2009. At this point, so many things are normal that were not previously that comics need to adjust to compensate. We don’t need Black Panther launching during Black History Month twice in a row. It’s nice, and I appreciate the sentiment, but break out of this idea that each new thing that isn’t white and male is an event.
At the same time, we need to stop rewarding people for doing the barest minimum. Ham-fisted allegories or cheap and emotionally manipulative scenes means that you’re a hack writer, not some revolutionary bringing the truth down off the mount.
If you go outside, you’re going to see someone who looks, talks, or acts like me. If I go outside, I’ll see someone who looks like you. We’re both normal. We are different, but we aren’t different. By and large, we share the same culture.
I went to New York Comic-con 2009 this weekend and had a grand old time. I met up with Gavin, Tucker and Nina Stone, Timothy Callahan, Julian, Ron Wimberly, the Funnybook Babylon gang, LeSean Thomas, Sean Witzke, Cheryl Lynn, and probably half a dozen more people over the course of the weekend.
What’s striking, though, is how the con doesn’t really represent the make-up of the stereotypical comics reader. Yes, there are the chubby white dudes wheeling carts full of comic books to be signed and being rude (a special shout-ot to the guy dressed as a robot who hit me in the head with his boombox). Yes, there were dozens of Slave Leias clogging up the aisles like half-naked roaches. However, there were a lot of girls, latinos, and black folks.
This wasn’t really shocking to me as much as it was just a confirmation of the song I’ve been singing for years now– we’ve always been here. I grew up on comics. Everyone I know grew up on these books, black or white. We all found something to love. I’ve noticed that most of the black people I know leaned toward Marvel for a variety of reasons.
The con was real life– it’s the world that I’m used to seeing, it’s the world that I grew up in, and it’s the world that all of us know. I saw black dude working a booth with some anime thong on his head (I *smh*’d, seriously), others wearing Naruto headbands (I *smh*’d again, you aren’t tupac), and others just dressed like normal people. Some were even dressed as grown-ups. What matters is that there was a huge variety of people there. Young, old, and everywhere in-between. Some were there for indie books, others for superhero pieces, and still others for that creepy porno people always sell at cons.
I went to two panels on Sunday, which doubled my total for the weekend. The first was the Multiculturalism in Comics panel, which was okay, save for a few bumps which I probably won’t get into later as they’re overall meaningless. But, the second panel was the Hip-hop and Comics panel, which was not printed in the show flyer (It was shown as ??? and had no description). It featured Chuck D, DMC of Run DMC, Kyle Baker, James Bomb, Adam Wallenta, and a couple other guys whose name escapes me.
It was pretty wonderful. Rather than being a shillfest for PE’s comic, which was only mentioned maybe twice, it was about growing up in the ’60s and ’70s and what they were into. It was about the intersection between rap and superheroes. It was about everything I’ve ever talked about in one hour long panel.
One thing I hate are comic fans who get upset when somebody goes “Ha ha, nerds!” It’s stupid self-hating lack of self-esteem-having silliness. This panel was the opposite. It was a bunch of guys in touch with their inner nerd and not feeling bad about it at all. One guy mentioned that he was getting stellar grades in school and was being tested for access to a gifted class in school. The teacher asked him if he knew what espionage meant. His response?
“Like in Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division?”
“What?”
“Uh, it means spy stuff. Espionage.”
Other notable shout-outs were White Tiger (Hector Ayala from Spanish Harlem, “’cause where else are you gonna put a Puerto Rican in New York City?”), Shang-Chi, Moon Knight, and Spider-Man (who is from Queens, and a favorite of Kyle Baker and DMC, both of whom are Queensborn).
I wish I had recorded the panel, because it was everything I want to do in BHM09 all in one place. It talked about how the fact that Marvel’s characters had problems you could relate to and lived in NYC made them more real and relatable than other characters.
It was as much a celebration of comics, and loving comics, as it was about hip-hop. They often mentioned how secret identities informed the creation of rap aliases and costumes, and even how Peter Parker being a normal kid with an outlandish alter ego helped turn Darryl McDaniel into a Devastating Mic Controller.
Everyone reads comics. Comics are a mirror to our society. It shows our fears, hopes, dreams, failures, vulnerabilities, and possibilities. For comics not to reflect us (and by us I mean “people,” not “black people”), even as it reflects all this other stuff, is silly.
No, silly is the wrong word. It’s stupid. It’s stupid because it’s so glaringly obvious a child can see it.
Flip it horizontally, and what do you have…?
I really enjoyed the new volume of Afro Samurai. Resurrection stripped out all of the dross from the first Afro Samurai film. Romance subplot? Gone. Meandering explanations? Gone. Light characterization? Gone. What was left was a lean exploitation flick in the style of Ninja Scroll or Fist of the North Star.
Looking fresh is still a huge part of rap culture and one of the biggest meccas for streetwear fashion is… Tokyo. I spent a week in Tokyo back in October and man, I could’ve spent thrice what I did on clothes and sneakers. I came home with two different books that were basically sneakerhead fetishism. Kids in fitted Yankees New Eras hit me with the head nod as I walked past and I bonded with these two dudes who didn’t speak a word of English other than “B.I.G.” and “Nas.” I used to live in Spain, I’ve been to France, and found rap fans in both places.
It’s worldwide, and that’s a beautiful thing. People talk about Obama getting elected as if it was the end of racism. Well, that’s dumb. Obama being president isn’t going to change racism. But, right now, there are whole countries full of kids growing up in and around black culture, repping it like it was their own. In a way, they have made it their own by accepting it and modifying it to fit their own culture. These kids identifying and learning from each other because they have that common ground… that’s where post-racialism is going to come from. Not from one man doing one thing. It’s going to come from sharing cultures.
It’s not going to be a flip of a switch. It’s not going to be as easy as declaring “mission complete!” or just up and deciding that we’re post-racial. There’s got to be give and take and push and pull and just something deeper than mere co-existing before post-racialism happens. This is part of why I think that having the two biggest superhero comics out actually represent their audience, and real life, is vital.
I don’t think #1 could have been anything other than The Roots.
I’ve been a fan since Things Fall Apart. I think I got it off the strength of You Got Me and the fact that Mos Def was a feature and man, I got one incredible album for my money. Or my mom’s money. Whichever.
That album introduced me to Eve and Beanie Sigel and Jill Scott, forced me to listen to and gain an appreciation of Erykah Badu (she could miss me with that Call Tyrone business, I was a teenager and not trying to hear that), and pretty much solidified my taste in music. I stayed in that neo-soul/conscious rap vein for years, and never really left it.
(I have a spanish remix of You Got Me called Me Tienes. It’s just as good as the original.)
To say that I’m partial to The Legendary Roots Crew would be an understatement. When added into the mix with the Dungeon Family, Wu-Tang Clan, and Company Flow, you can pretty much decipher why I have the taste in music that I do. The Roots are a pillar for me.
Rising Down is easily their best effort since Things Fall Apart. There are a lot of features, but it isn’t just for the sake of sales. Each feature goes in on their respective verse, resulting in an album full of heavy songs.
One of the highlights is Black Thought’s solo joint, 75 Bars. He’s always been an underrated emcee, even though he’s a beast on the mic. He gets his Beanie Sigel on and delivers three minutes of free association raw rap. He rips it for every second of the three minutes, to the point where picking just a few lines to quote is a lost cause.
Peedi Crakk delivers one of the best verses on the album with his guest spot on Get Busy. Get Busy is also notable because it’s a Philly hometown pride track– DJ Jazzy Jeff, creator of one of my favorite albums from last year, is behind the scratches.
It’s Crakk man, used to back spin
Now I spend stacks and stacks
and Uncle Sam tryin’ to tax all my hard earned raps
Damn! We makin’ Yens, Pesos, Euros, we representin’
Wale, Chrisette Michelle, Saigon, Dice Raw, Styles P, Malik B, and Common are all some of the features on the album, and all are top notch. The actual production is up the the usual Roots quality. The album veers from laid back (Rising Down) to frantic (75 Bars) and it doesn’t hurt it any. The variety gives Rising Down legs, since there’s always a track for your current mood.
I couldn’t pick a favorite track on this album if I tried. It’s full of catchy choruses, great verses, and amazing beats. I sing off-key to Birthday Girl just like everyone else, and Singing Man is another one that brings out that kind of behavior.
It’s just like, man, could these guys be any more talented? Even bad Roots albums are just bad in the context of albums like Things Fall Apart and Come Alive and Do You Want More?!!??!. Why are so many rappers amazingly terrible?
Congratulations to The Roots for embarrassing rappers again. Keep on doing it until they all start coming correct.
The rest of y’all need to buy Rising Down and take notes.
Official videos:
75 Bars
Get Busy
Birthday Girl
Rising Up
(I’m gonna take a day or so and then get back to talking about comics. I haven’t been to the shop since before Christmas.)
I listen to a lot of mixtapes. They’re a great source of free tunes, they let your favorite artists wreck other artist’s beats, and really, they let you hear hungry people before they get fat and tired. Mixtapes are worth it because a lot of artists will break down some kind of clever gimmick in order to get attention. I don’t use gimmick in the derogatory sense, mind you– just in that it’s an attention getter. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but here’s my five favorite mixtapes of 08, with a bit of commentary.
Did I mention that mixtapes are free? Download links after each mini-review.
Super props to 2dopeboyz for a) hooking me up with these mixtapes and most of my new music and b) having the best website name on the net.
Honorable Mention: BK Cyph x 2dopeboyz – Never Sold Crack: The Series
BK Cyph is a dope lyricist, and his Never Sold Crack: The Series is like Ghostface’s Run– straight up storytelling rap. It’s begging to be animated or put into comic form or something. You can catch it here on 2db. Download them starting with #8 and listen to them in order.
#5: XV – 40 Days, 40 Nights
Sometimes, you just have to respect someone’s work ethic. Crooked I and Mickey Factz did weekly series for a good long while. XV broke out with something even more serious– 40 days and 40 nights of music. That’s two songs a day, if you aren’t good at math.
And he did it. He freaked new beats, old beats, and pretty much every hot song you could find. NERD’s Spaz turned into Frag Out, an Xbox Live anthem. Mos Def’s Mr. Nigga got a remake for 2008, Andre 3k’s She Lives In My Lap showed up, and Kanye’s Love Lockdown caught a remix. The line that really made me stand up and pay attention was this bit on Mr. Nigga:
Now, who is the cat that’s relaxing in the sauna
and somebody asks, “So, what you think about Obama?
I dunno, maybe you have to live in San Francisco to get it.
There’s something here for everyone, from comic fans (Day 32 featured “Galactus (The Planet Eater)” and “Silver Surfer”) to game fans (“Frag Out”), classic rap fans, and even fans of The Killers. When Blogs Cry is the most bizarre Prince remake I’ve heard in ages, too.
The original files can be found here on 2db, where I first got them. However, I re-uploaded them because I ended up re-tagging all of the mp3s. I added them all into the same album, as opposed to being separated into 40 Days and 40 Nights, and renamed them so that they’re in the format “(Day 26-N) Go In (produced by Just Blaze)”– it makes sense when you look at it, and they’re all in order, too. Grab that from right here.
#4: The Clipse – Road to Till The Casket Drops
Yo, I wish the Clipse would stop misspelling things. Play Cloths and Road Till the Casket Drops have them looking bummy.
Anyway, The Clipse have basically been mixtape kings for a few years now. Their We Got It 4 Cheap series have been mostly great, even though the retail release was like biting into a hot buttered brick. Road to… is their latest mixtape, and it’s largely a Clipse solo joint. They get on over Swagger Like Us, Pop Champagne, Addiction, and a couple other hot joints from this year.
It’s a testament to their skill at doing their kind of rap that even though the subject matter isn’t all that different from WGI4C or Hell Hath No Fury or Lord Willin’, the songs stay interesting. I feel like So Fly (Now We’ve Had Her) is the weakest track on the album, but the rest are pretty tight.
They even get on Lupe Fiasco’s Dumb It Down, which is practically the anti-drug rap theme song, and turn it to Numb It Down, which is about (you guessed it) selling dope. It’s the kind of move that’s so bizarre it works. It’s as if someone went and turned Burn, Hollywood, Burn into the theme song for next year’s summer blockbuster, and it worked. It’s weird. The contrast is kind of nuts.
Complex magazine has the download for you.
#3: Esso x 2dopeboyz – The Gardens
I discovered ESSO earlier this year, and he’s remained a favorite. I’ve burned through his mixtapes, and he’s put out a staggering amount of music in the past couple of years. It’s good for my brain, bad for my HD space. His three full-length mixtapes, ESSOcentric, ESSObama, and E3: E-Day (make sure you watch Anti-backpack) are all bangers. E3 came close to taking #3 on this list, even.
But, no, instead, it’s gotta be The Gardens.
I listened to Lil Wayne’s Carter III when it came out like everybody else. I was kind of amazed that codeine had turned Wayne into such a dope rapper, but the album didn’t really click for me. I blamed the rhymes– Wayne was clever, but mostly style. The beats were hot enough that I’d been keeping my eye out for an instrumental version.
The Gardens is Esso rhyming about his life, love, and living over six of Weezy’s Carter beats, including the Kanye produced “Let The Beat Build” as “Get Ya Beat Killed.” Maybe it should have been called “That’s how you get your album killed,” because I haven’t gone back to Tha Carter III since. The Gardens is a thorough little… EP, I guess, going by the length. The rhymes are tight, the beats are hard, and it’s just fun to listen to. It sounds like the kind of album that’s both carefully chosen and sounds like it was done for fun. Hit up 2db for the hookup.
#2: B.o.B. – Who the Fuck is B.o.B.
I’d seen B.o.B. around, but it was this mixtape that sold me. The only way I know how to describe him, and I hate to do him a disservice by comparing him to other artists, is that he’s kind of like what someone who was Andre 3000 and Big Boi from OutKast at the same time. He flips back and forth between painfully honest raps (“I used to wear a grill, because that was the trend/ not because I liked it, I just wanted to fit in” on Generation Lost) and that down south bump I still love.
Other than a guest Lil Boosie on an otherwise hot song, this album is pretty much one banger after another. Bobby Ray sat down and made one of the best albums of the year, proving that he’s one of the best dudes to debut lately.
He’s charming, not afraid to poke fun at himself, and has sick flow. Just from a flow perspective, he’s worth listening to. He even takes a stab at racism on track 17, Nigger. It’s as tongue-in-cheek and pointed as Auto Tune, his ode to the gimmick of 2008.
Download it here, courtesy of The Smoking Section.
#1: Wale – The Mixtape About Nothing
Did you meet anybody who didn’t like this mixtape? I probably don’t even have to recommend it to you. I bet you already have it, don’t you?
For those new to the party, just go ahead and download it. It’s Wale creating an album in the form of an homage to Seinfeld. Rather than just being an album to hang Seinfeld references on, he uses the gimmick to hammer on a bunch of different topics.
Honestly, just google him. Download the mixtape and google him and then come back and thank me.
